Welcome to Oak Ridge

Oak Ridge opened on February 21, 1933 as the "Criminal Insane Building" - a specialized division within the existing Ontario Hospital, Penetanguishene. For 81 years it would remain the only maximum-security forensic mental health care centre in the province of Ontario and would serve an exclusively male population.

As a mental health facility, treatment was at the core of daily activities at Oak Ridge throughout its history. What exactly that treatment consisted of, however, ranged significantly over the 81 years the division was in operation.

Treatment practices at Oak Ridge at times overlapped completely with the models being followed by its fellow mental health institutions across the province, while at other times were at the cutting edge of new and novel experimentation. A few of the programs were relatively short-lived trials; others spanned the entire history of the division.

There was one program implemented at Oak Ridge that can be described as truly unique to the division. Between roughly 1963 and 1977, half of the patient population at Oak Ridge were engaged in what became known as "the Oak Ridge program." While the other half of the division were engaged in a token economy program, those on E, F, G, and H-wards participated in a therapeutic community model whereby patients directed their own treatment.

The Social Therapy Unit at Oak Ridge really took on its own identity beginning the year after Dr. Barker’s arrival. The components of the program – group psychotherapy sessions, committee, and Council meetings – became compulsory. These sessions encouraged confrontation among the patients in order to push individuals to contribute more. The sessions ranged from supportive to anxiety arousing. Patients who refused attendance were forcibly brought to all sessions and prevented from leaving. Any patient who was deemed at risk of suicide or self-harm was physically handcuffed to another patient who became responsible for ensuring their safety – and continued participation in the programming. There was little recreational diversion of any sort provided for the patients on these wards, the STU was all-encompassing.

To further encourage communication among the patients on the STU, a range of mind-altering drugs were incorporated into the programming on G- and F-Wards beginning in 1966. In March of that year, G-Ward patients began to receive injections of sodium amytal, a drug best known as a sort of "truth serum." To ward off the sedative properties of the drug, patients were likewise given the stimulant methedrine. In their drug-induced state, the patients would then be interviewed by the other patients. Several months later, scopolamine, a drug with similar properties to sodium amytal that caused confusion and a lowering of inhibitions, was also administered to patients.A year later, in February of 1967, patients on G-Ward began receiving d-Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD-25). LSD, colloquially known as "acid," had been used previously in psychiatric experiments in Canada - most notably at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal and the Saskatchewan Mental Hospital in Weyburn - as both a potential treatment for alcoholism and as a drug which could provide insight into the mind of a person suffering from hallucinations.

In 1967 a final alteration was made to the STU programming: the creation of the Total Encounter Capsule on F-Ward. The Total Encounter Capsule was a specially designed 8’ x 10’ windowless chamber at the end of the F-Ward corridor in which all distractions - books, television, music, etc - had been removed. It featured a one-way mirror through which participants inside the Capsule could be continually observed. Bright lights were kept on so that participants could not track the time of day. An open toilet was provided and liquid food was made available to the patients through an entry point in the wall.The patients of F-Ward entered the Capsule with nothing - not even their clothing - and remained confined within the space together initially for periods of between two to four months and later, for several weeks at a time. The expectation was that once they were free of distractions within the Capsule environment, patients would shed their inhibitions and share their thoughts freely with the group (and those monitoring their progress outside of the Capsule). The administration of mind-altering intravenous drugs was continued, with patients both determining who would receive the injection and when it would be administered.

The red brick Oak Ridge building officially closed in 2014. Today, Ontario continues to use the same location for its only maximum security forensic hospital, Waypoint Centre for Mental Health Care.